'Almost Pristine' Release

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- Ported to Ardor3D engine, to resolve stability issues
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New voicpacks (by various contributors)
- Bugfixes
- New secondary terrain added for large view distance
- Corrected Shadow and Depth of Field effect
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Candidates for Testing - don't hesitate! And don't forget to report back at the forums, trac or IRC chat channel.

If you wish to make the dev happy, don't forget to donate some bucks to the project through paypal (at the left side of the blog, the links positions your browser there). It will help to keep the enthusiasm high and reassure the exhausted developer. It still needs ~-$327$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog) to have a 0 budget regarding the music creation costs.

Please note, that the project greatly lacks female voice packs, so if you happen to be a kind lady, please stop by and create a voice pack for the game. :)

Next step in the project plan is to work out dialoges/trading/quest system, so after this technical release, we'll concentrate on gameplay elements again.

Under Macintosh you will need to run the jClassicRPG.sh from console as clicking it might not start it if your OSX is not configured to run it as script. Please note that most probably game won't run with Intel video cards as recent Intel GPU driver releases under Windows and Linux caused the game to stop working.

Female Voicepack contribution by Bunches and Donation!

Good news in the new 2010 year! Project got a few new members on the forum! Long time lurker and tester Bri (aka dragonbait) joined us there and right after Bunches came who I had known from bit'o'moander (unquie classic RPG related forum) and chimed in with a supercool new voicepack - our first fully-fledged female voicepack ever! Many thanks to Bunches! :-)

Right after these great events just today the project received a new donation that will help to cover more of the pending costs (related to music creation). Many thanks to Greg Wilcox from the USA!

Important quick fix again and great news - donation received!

Hello, folks!

A problem experienced by some of the testers and also reported on happypenguin.org, is now hunted down and exterminated! It was related to the logging of X11 events and a badly created filter pattern in Jcrpg.java. Now it's rooted out and committed. You can find a zip with the fixed ./bin directory of the release here: link. I will provide a patch release on sf.net later (hopefully tomorrow).

Another problem experienced on some weaker video cards (like 9600 mobility or intel video chip) can be resolved by first running the game with the jcrpg-lowest-debug.sh. (Then go to option menu and probably switch off the Normal maps totally too, save it, and later you can use the jcrpg.sh to play the game as the low settings got saved that way.) So if it looks like you are having troubles with starting, try to fall back to that jcrpg-lowest-debug.sh/bat file.

Very good news is that the project got a new donator! We have received donation of $5. Big thanks go out! I'm contactacting the donator to get info if I can share the name or nickname (desired one) of the donator before I can post it here and add to the DONATORS file of the project.

EDIT: The new donator is Chris Noffsinger from the USA. Thanks Chris!!
Donator granted me permission to share his name.

Polishing, ironing out bugs, recent donations

I was concentrating on testing the new features and fixing the bugs that got into the code. At the moment I'm in the process of fixing the world map thingy which seems to be incorrect regarding the geography representation. I plan to iron out some remaining bugs while freezing the addition of new features into the game till the release of the next prealpha test package. Recently mvrasseli has come to the forums of jcrpg and has started to work on a new piece of music for the mountain caves. You can check the progress here.

Good news is that the latest donation campaign is starting to spin up with two recent donators (Juan and Josh, thanks!) sending some coins (till now a total of $30), catalyzing the 'Free the CC-BY-SA-NC soundtracks to CC-BY-SA' thing that is going on. After these now $20 is requested to free the first track from the NonCommercial term. I've added a little section, so that you can see the virtual budget of the project on the left side now under the 'Project Budget' panel.

PS: World map fixed. Now positioning is correct and I managed to fix the population pixels too. White shows normal villages, yellow shows dangerous maze populations - check it on the screenshot. :D
PS2: First $50 reached, tomorrow I will relicense the first track (The March On Ice) under CC-BY-SA (it's too late here now 11PM :)).

[EDIT] 8 new jcrpg soundtracks on Jamendo - waiting for a $340 of donation ($60 received).

As you might remember recently I've published 3 tracks of the game on jamendo.com. The time came again now to release the 8 tracks newly created in the past weeks, and the Holidays. I've been working on these for over 2 months in my free hours in the night. It was refreshing and fun to create them. Hopefully you'll find them enjoyable. All the tracks are released under the Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA-NC), so you are free to download/copy/spread/use/modify it freely as long as you attribute it to me, use the same license for derivations and don't use it for commercial purpose (yes, NonCommercial, but read on, as that term I propose to remove if some circumstances are met). So there's two tracks serving as the background music for each of the current 4 climate zones of the game. They are all created to resemble symphonic genre, mostly calm or slow, and the overall length is around 30 minutes. (Optionally you can browse them in the SVN repository here.)

The instrument library used for the 8 tracks gives it a really big boost. Before creating them I've decided to use the East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Gold Edition, following the advice of Jasper Brownrigg who created the fantastic main theme for jClassicRPG using this library.

But choosing the EWQLSO Gold Edition was not the cheap way to go, it cost me $495 for the library + iLok key ($39.95) + shipping costs ($58, yes, i had to pay that much, the shop uses FedEx priority package only for shipping to my country), a total of $590 + VAT. That's a bit of a reason why I've decided to release the new tracks under a license with the NonCommercial term. But the deal is the following: if some of the unselfish people around who eventually like these tracks donated to encourage me and also to free the tracks ($50 per one track = 8x$50 = $400) I would re-release the tracks without the NonCommercial term. This call for donation is not about the price of the sound library, but the work I've put into the creation of the tracks and that if people like it enough or not to capacitate them for financial steps towards the project. I plan to create more tracks, at some point it might come that not just for jcrpg but for other projects as well. While I'm treading on this new road it would be really encouraging to have some of you donate to this cause! :)

So at this moment of publishing the first version of this blog post, the virtual budget of the project is -$400. Every time the sum reaches a new $50 limit (50,100,150...) I will free one of the tracks (in the order of the album track list). Upon every donation I will update this post to reflect donations, add donator names as comments (if the donator agrees), and also I will add donator names to the list in the game SVN, and later game releases. Donations are possible through PayPal here (that is just a positioning link, you still have to click on 'Make A Donation' button on this blog page).

Constructive criticism is much welcome!

UPDATE1: First donation for soundtracks received from Juan Carlos 'Furor' (Spain)
UPDATE2: Donation received from Joshua Slack 'renanse' (USA)
UPDATE3: Donation received from Bri 'Dragonbait' (USA)
-> sum of $50 reached, first track of the album (Arctic2.ogg, The March on Ice) is now CC-BY-SA.
UPDATE4: Donation received from Thomas (Germany)

[EDIT] Money donations reached limit - lead dev will purchase an AMD ATi card

This thread and this older discussion (MacOSX part) is pushing me to purchase a video card that otherwise I wouldn't buy (an AMD Sapphire Radeon HD3450 256MB DDR2 PCIe). (I mostly buy nVidia to make life easier as a linux user.) If you want to support the project's development and testing on AMD/ATi cards then consider donating some bucks with paypal. That way you can make me believe that there's a chance that open source development can nullify costs with the help of Free Open Source Software loving people and also I could continuously test the game on AMD/ATi cards. :) The project hasn't got any donations yet, but this is the first purchase that I would do only because of the project's need. The card would cost around 42$ or 30 Euros so the bar isn't raised too high. I do have that amount of money, but that purchase would represent my personal need only. Instead, let's see the real need of the project by own as you'll or will not show it to us. Can you people jump over that bar? I bet so (I'm superoptimistic)! :)

PS: As a first step I will add donation listing here in form of comments. (I plan to create a full list of donators as well.) First I will add them without name. If the person is willing to be listed with some kind of name (real or not), please drop me an email to illespal at gmail dot com with your real name (that should be in my paypal transaction log) so that I can verify, and add the name requested by you to the list of Donators. (It will be added to the SVN as well and to the releases.)

EDIT:
The donations have reached the limit needed for the video card and even got over it just in 5 hours!! (Read comments.) Big thanks to our first donators in the history of jClassicRPG!! I will buy the card in my favorite store.